This study has to a large extent been an attempt to make order out of chaos. I began my research intending to write about recognizable “stock characters,” (“the heroine,” “the villain,” “the helper,” etc.) as Malcolm Lyons and Peter Heath had for the male characters from the sīrahs. It soon became clear, however, that I had vastly
underestimated the flexibility and assimilatory nature of a genre based on a such a long oral tradition, and perhaps the complexity of medieval Islamic views on women. My list of characters that fit into recognizable categories quickly became shorter than my list of “exceptions,” and I realized I would have to look at these complex characters through a different lens if I wished to understand their roles. After much thought and discussion, after the creation of many charts and spreadsheets, two connected organizing principles began to appear: the bonds of family and the ways in which women’s power was
interpreted, praised, or punished by the narrators of the sīrahs. Family ties, as the primary structure of medieval Islamic society, largely determined in what ways women were able to exercise power. The expression of this power determined whether its practice was lauded, tolerated, or punished.
The preceding chapters have been an attempt to thoroughly explore these connections, as well as how their portrayals of women were different from or similar to those in more elite forms of medieval Islamic literature. In the first chapter, I explored how women deemed sexually available to men in medieval Islamic society, no matter their age or marital status, were considered potential threats to male sovereignty and
agents of chaos (fitnah) in the sīrahs. This is a departure from the portrayals of women in elite forms of literature, where only non-virgins are portrayed as threatening. I
determined that the figure of the virgin princess, usually foreign and possessing a dangerous combination of beauty and vigor, had more in common with the witty slave concubines of historical, biographical, and adab literature of the period than they did with the shy virgins described in that corpus. In the sīrahs, access to power over men is by definition temporary: either a woman is “converted” to more traditional womanhood, or she is summarily killed. Her talents, be they intelligence, martial skill, or leadership ability, are seen as potentially beneficial to society. However, certain social structures are too important to break, and women who refuse to enter into them cannot be allowed to prosper.
In the second chapter, I explored how sisterhood and daughterhood, as familial relationships that are defined by Islamic law and custom as necessarily non-sexual, grant women another form of temporary power in the sīrahs. What I have deemed “power-to” can be seen in almost identical expressions in both the elite and popular literature of the Middle Periods: sisters and daughters are able to obtain a temporary dispensation to act in unconventional ways because their societies conflate their identities with those of their brothers or fathers. Because these relationships are seen as naturally nonsexual, they are allowed to be emotionally close without fears of female domination. However, this is merely a temporary withholding of judgment: either a sister or daughter commits to using her talents exclusivelyto better the lives of her family and community, thus transmuting
her activities into “power-with,” or she pursues an independent agenda and is judged to be exercising “power-over,” with all the consequences that designation carries.
In the final chapter, I described the only expression of female power that is allowed to continue indefinitely in the sīrahs: “power-with.” All other expressions of power must eventually be judged to fulfill the requirements of this category in order to be accepted as beneficial to the community. Though the actions of both male and female characters in the sīrahs are judged by whether they benefit society, there are fewer requirements for men than for women, and more flexibility in how the requirements are expressed. Finally, when it comes to being judged a hero, a female character must fulfill the idealized roles of both a man and a woman in order to be successful.
As I have emphasized throughout this study, it is difficult to say just how reflective the attitudes displayed in the sīrahs may be of society in the Islamic Middle Periods. These tales are by nature mutable, and they assimilate the views of each
individual storyteller in the centuries before they are written down. They were also meant to entertain, and some of the more extraordinary female characters are likely meant to be just that: extraordinary, or exciting, or an escape from the realities of everyday life. However, the sheer volume of complex female characters impossible to essentialize to their “stock” characteristics, which appears to be unique to popular literature, suggests that a particular audience, separate from that addressed by more elite forms of literature, was interested in these portrayals. Was the juxtaposition of women and power titillating to male audiences for its strangeness, or did men recognize aspects of women they knew in these characters and cheer for them? Were there women in the audience to whom the
storytellers wished to appeal, or was it an unremarkable fact of life that women were more involved in the public aspects of society than the authors of more elite forms of literature were willing to admit? In many ways, my study has revealed as many questions as it has answered, which opens exciting avenues of inquiry.
Future Directions
The impetus to begin this study was my realization that the secondary sources on the sīrah genre had thus far completely ignored the many and varied roles played by female characters. My hope is that the comprehensive approach I have taken here, emphasizing connections and similarities within the genre, can act as an accessible introduction to the vast universe of female characters in these narratives. From here, I think it is essential to go in the opposite direction, with studies emphasizing differences. Studies of the female characters in individual sīrahs could treat aspects that a broad study like this one could not. Research exploring linguistic and narrative elements that affect female characters, like naming conventions, how a rural or urban setting affects the portrayal of women, and whether women’s poetry differs from that of men, would be able to show how individual sīrahs construct their own attitudes about women that may be different from other examples of the genre. Tracing how the portrayal of women changes over time in the various versions of specific sīrahs could show how much a given
storyteller’s biases affect characterization. This would be particularly valuable for those stories, like Sīrat ʿAntar and Sīrat Banī Hilāl, that are still being adapted and interpreted in modern forms of media. Finally, for the tales that exist in various different languages and cultures, like Sīrat Iskandar and Sīrat Ḥamzah, examining how female characters
change or remain the same in the various cultural interpretations would be a valuable contribution to our understanding of how these characters reflect their societies. These are just a few ways in which I hope my research can act as a starting point for the truly rigorous study of female characters in the sīrah, who can add a great deal to our understanding of medieval Islamic morals, practices, and cultural attitudes.